Are trolls born or can we all be one?

"Hiding in the shadows" (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0) by Angela.Kwak

Social media are the hunting grounds of trolls and few news media comments sections escape their attention, leading in many cases to the withdrawal of such sections. There are of course different degrees of trolldom from the infamous troll factories who make money deliberately sabotaging political discussion to individuals with anger management issues. I often wonder how people can thrive on such negativity and enjoy insulting, threatening and winding up other people, but it seems they do. But is there a little troll inside us all, waiting for the right cues to rise to the surface?

There is of course research on troll behaviour and I can recommend this article from researchers at Stanford and Cornell Universities, Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions. They carried out an extensive survey of comments on CNN news stories as well as conducting a simulated online discussion to see what patterns of troll behaviour emerged and whether such behaviour is infectious. It seems that trolls are not just born, we all risk getting sucked into a certain element of trolling if the right conditions are met.

While prior work suggests that trolling behavior is confined to a vocal and antisocial minority, we demonstrate that ordinary people can engage in such behavior as well. We propose two primary trigger mechanisms: the individual’s mood, and the surrounding context of a discussion (e.g., exposure to prior trolling behavior). Through an experiment simulating an online discussion, we find that both negative mood and seeing troll posts by others significantly increases the probability of a user trolling, and together double this probability.

I think many of us will admit to firing off the occasional sarcastic retort on Twitter or Facebook especially when someone has made an unfair or abusive comment. We might even get involved in a mud slinging session that we later regret. However for me a troll is someone who joins a discussion with the deliberate intent to sabotage a discussion or to bully particular members of the group. For me, trolling is bullying, taking pleasure in hurting others. In many online communities there are volunteers who devote their evenings and even nights to patrolling the digital streets and trying to defuse potentially dangerous situations. By immediately intervening in a thread that is going out of control they can defuse the situation but only when they are dealing with people who are simply overreacting or in a foul mood. The genuine trolls are almost impossible to stop since they thrive on confrontation and the only way to deal with them is by ejecting them from the community.

In such well-managed discussion groups with clear guidelines, timely moderation and real name policy, trolling can be kept at a minimum and this leads to a supportive and tolerant community. It requires great sensitivity on the part of the administrators to be able to distinguish between people who are just having a bad day and go too far once in a while and genuinely malevolent trolls. In many groups an administrator will try to reason with the offender, preferably in a private chat, and this often results in that person deleting their offensive comments and agreeing to abide by the group rules in the future. Many have a policy of three strikes and you're out, giving warnings and then if the abuse continues the offender is ejected. In some cases instant ejection is the only way to deal with abuse but for many a certain amount of leeway might help. The article ends by warning against simply banning everyone who steps out of line and recommends greater flexibility.

Trolling stems from both innate and situational factors – where prior work has discussed the former, this work focuses on the latter, and reveals that both mood and discussion context affect trolling behavior. This suggests the importance of different design affordances to manage either type of trolling. Rather than banning all users who troll and violate community norms, also considering measures that mitigate the situational factors that lead to trolling may better reflect the reality of how trolling occurs.

Reference

Cheng, J., Bernstein, M., Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., Leskovec, J. (2017) Anyone Can Become a Troll: Causes of Trolling Behavior in Online Discussions. CSCW '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, February 2017. Pages 1217–1230 https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998213

Combating academic spam

CC0 Public domain on Max Pixel

One of the week's most interesting stories is the disappearance of Jeremy Beale's (University of Colorado at Denver) excellent watchdog site on predatory journals and publishers. According to an article in Inside Higher Ed, No More 'Beall's List', the site was suddenly taken down and replaced with a notice "This service is no longer available" and since then Beale has not been available for any comment, leading to speculation in social media and news sites. According to an article in ScienceInsider:

Beall declined to comment. But a CU Denver spokesperson told ScienceInsider that Beall made a “personal decision” to take down his list of low-quality journals that charge authors a fee to publish, often with little or no review or editing. The spokesperson says the blog was not hacked, nor was it taken down as a result of legal threats, and Beall will remain on the school’s faculty. The spokesperson could not confirm whether the blog's removal is permanent.

Beale's list has become an important monitor of publications that spam academics, offering publication at a price and falsely claiming to use peer review, as well as a myriad of bogus conferences that invite academics to contribute (at a price) and then at best only offering a token event. Academic spam is a major issue and it can be hard for many to tell between the serious journals and conference organisers and the bogus ones. I'm not a very significant name in the academic community but even my in-box receives several academic spam mails per day offering me the chance to publish in some obscure journal or an appearance at a conference on a theme that I don't even work with. The extremely long list of so-called open access publishers in Beale's lists could be seen to discredit the open model but at the same time there are thousands of serious peer-reviewed open access publications. Whenever new models are tested there will be people who will try to exploit new freedoms and therefore it is vital to have watchdogs and whistle-blowers who can expose the less serious actors.

According to some reports, the site and its related Facebook group has been withdrawn due to pressure or threats, though there are no precise details on this. Anyone providing such a watchdog service risks the fury of those who are blacklisted and Beale has certainly had to put up with considerable opposition over the years. At the same time there is always the risk of accusing an innocent party. This is a major undertaking and is simply not sustainable if it is run by an individual, not matter how dedicated. A better solution would be an international organisation with high credibility to take over the role but more in terms of quality assurance rather than as whistle-blower. A colleague of mine suggested that the list could instead be one of approved journals and conferences and that a quality assurance framework and certification could make it clear which journals were serious and which were not. We need to build on and promote internationally recognised quality labels for open access publications to make it easier to spot the fraudsters.

Not surprisingly Beale's list has now been republished on a number of sites but such measures are only a temporary solution. The list must be continually updated and reviewed and it is also essential that those on the list are given a fair chance to improve and be taken off the list. Jeremy Beale has done a great job over the years but one pioneer cannot keep such a service going. Which organisation can step up and take over?

A detailed chronicle of this story is given in this blog post, What Happened to Jeffrey Beall’s List of (Allegedly) Predatory Publishers?

E-mail generation

 by Farid Iqbal

E-mail is the default tool for digital communication in most organisations. You simply can't work without it and since most people have mobile access to their work account the mails just keep rolling in 24/7. The sheer volume of e-mail leads to considerable stress and I've seen colleagues with over 100 unread mails in their inbox. Even if most users complain about the volume and have problems clearing the backlog very few dare to use other services even if they are patently better at doing some of the jobs that e-mail fails to do. We somehow see e-mail as more trustworthy than other types of communication such as instant messaging, shared work spaces or collaborative documents despite the often-reported fact that over 90% of all e-mail is spam and so many viruses, trojans and other malware are transmitted by e-mail. It's a complicated love-hate relationship.

Students however have abandoned e-mail, according to an article the New York Times, Technology and the College Generation. Students seldom check their student e-mail accounts and this leads to a communication breakdown between them and their e-mail generation teachers and administrators. In the past there were often complaints about the university forcing students to use university accounts rather than letting them use their own private e-mail addresses but today's students don't even have an e-mail account. Some only have an account because many services like booking concert tickets or downloading a game demand an address in order to register. Using e-mail for communication is virtually unknown.

So students have abandoned e-mail whilst most people over 25 is hooked on it. That doesn't mean we're any good at using it. We misuse e-mail all the time, using it for tasks it simply is no good at. Most people still edit texts by mailing dozens of updated copies back and forth to each other when Google Drive or other collaborative tools do the job so much better. Many meetings take 50 e-mails to arrange (all using the dreaded Reply all button) instead of using a service like Doodle. Long discussions between members of a group (using Reply all to a group of thirty members) can fill your inbox in no time when the whole debate would be more efficiently run in a discussion forum.

The article also points out that faculty use of e-mail is not exactly exemplary:

“Faculty and staff love to blame students for not checking e-mail instead of owning up to the fact that no one ever got that good at using e-mail in the first place,” he said, citing vague subject lines and (exaggerating to make his point) 36-paragraph e-mails from faculty in which the crucial information is in paragraph 27. “How are they going to learn to use e-mail when that’s the model, and why would they want to?”

E-mail, like most tools, is good for some things and not so good at other things. Over the last 15 years we've used it for just about every type of transaction. Maybe we should listen to the students and try new ways of communicating, leaving e-mail to deal with what it's good at. Maybe if we were less addicted to it the spammers might also have top reconsider.

Less spam on Facebook

Teenagers show little interest in e-mail, dismissing it as a typical tool for parents and teachers. In addition many say that e-mail is mostly spam and they're quite right (see Wikipedia). Evidently about 80% of all e-mail is junk and it is therefore interesting that, despite this, it is still the communication tool of choice for most adults, especially at work. Admittedly most of us see very little of all the spam because our company's firewall works non-stop filtering out all the garbage that floods in round the clock.

  by  AJC1 

A critical success factor for Facebook, which is almost as ubiquitous as e-mail now, is to keep annoying junk messages off our news feed. I very nearly gave up with Facebook due to drowning in irritating updates of friends' activities in Farmville, Mafia Wars and assorted horoscope games and I know several who did leave. Of course you can easily switch off these updates but new ones keep turning up. However, according to an article on CNN, How Facebook killed (most) spam, there are new and painless methods for minimising the amount of irritating messages you receive.

Facebook evidently track how we react to different posts. If millions of people hide certain updates then Facebook will block them and notify the company responsible. If the company is concerned about its image they will find another way of spreading the word on Facebook. It becomes a sort of self-regulation since the responsible companies want people to like them. The problem is that the real spammers don't care what we think of them and will just keep pumping out the digital sewerage. Facebook will have to keep working hard to block the social spammers.